Tag Archives: classical education

December is an exciting month for me. For starters, I’ve got some cool presents coming my way next week. In the meantime, I’ve got plenty of fun education stuff to keep me busy. Earlier this month, I had the pleasure of highlighting some standouts among CDE’s annual award winners. This week, I have the honor of presenting the newest report card from Colorado School Grades. Some might wonder why I’m so excited about school grades. All the data is out there anyway, right? Those people have probably never experienced the sheer horror of navigating performance frameworks on CDE’s website. The information is there, and those with some level of knowledge and experience can find it without experiencing irreversible brain damage. Others who may want or need information on school performance—parents, for instance—are likely to find the system too onerous to be worth the effort. Colorado school grades rectifies that problem by putting everything into easily understood letter grades. But don’t let the simplicity fool you; all of the variables used by CDE are wrapped into those grades using a complex formula developed by the University of Colorado Denver.  Pretty cool if you ask me. I’ll let you play around with […]

Update, 8/18: Denise at Colorado Charters offers more information on the new Thomas MacLaren School, as well as an account of the ribbon cutting ceremony. If you live in the Colorado Springs area and have a student heading into the middle school years, you may want to take a look at the new Thomas MacLaren School. The tuition-free public charter school opens this month with classes from 6th to 9th grade. Eventually the school will serve students all the way up through high school. Many things set MacLaren apart from traditional public schools, but most prominent are: A classical education curriculum that builds from the basics of grammar (6th-8th grade) to the logic of finding “implications and relationships that exist among the ideas already learned” (9th-10th grade) to the higher-level rhetoric (11th-12th grade) “wherein students begin to synthesize and relate concepts already learned” — all students will be required to take four years of Latin Student uniforms Single-sex classrooms (that’s right: No yucky girls! I may have to look into this school….), except the fine arts classes (including choir, drama, etc.) and lunchtimes will be co-ed